Boris Karloff: The Man Behind the Monster is a comprehensive documentary about the famed actor who is indelibly linked with the Universal horror films of the 1930s – especially the monster in Frankenstein and the bandage-wrapped Mummy. What emerges in the documentary, however, was how versatile and gifted an actor he was, working in a slew of films in the 30s and 40s that are lesser-known but equally as frightful.
Through a series of talking-head interviews and clips from his films, we get a more complex picture of how this man of gravitas, whose stammer and lisp never held him back, became such an icon. Horror and fantasy maestro Guillermo Del Toro cites his work as incredibly influential, particularly on his own films – the Bride of Frankenstein’s Monster showing vulnerability and imbuing the monsters Del Toro created, decades later, with more soul. Other luminaries offering praise are American Werewolf In London director John Landis and Joe Dante, director of Gremlins.
Karloff never stopped working, even playing a man who has plastic surgery and ends up looking like Boris Karloff in the stage play Arsenic And Old Lace. Meta or what? One of his last films, the controversial Targets from 1968, played on his stature as a horror icon while delivering contemporary shocks; it was directed by Peter Bogdanovich, who revered Karloff, especially after he delivered a three-page speech at 2 am with crippling arthritis. He was an actor who embraced change and was reinvented by different generations coming to his performances for the first time. Thanks to reruns of those original monster movies on television, he became something of a star in that medium. A 1960s animated version of The Grinch that he voiced was partly modelled on him to boot.
Other fascinating facts emerge about Karloff throughout the film: his youth in India and Britain, his mixed ethnicity, the mental illness of his mother and his picaresque journey to Hollywood. The Man Behind The Monster is a no-frills documentary, cheap and cheerful, but full of nuggets that any horror fan will find interesting, not to mention illustrative of how long Karloff’s affably monstrous shadow stretches over the genre today.
Dir: Thomas Hamilton (PG, 98 mins)
Streaming on Shudder now
words KEIRON SELF
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